Hopelessly Devoted (The New Frankenstein)

Chapter 1

Isabella was never thought of as a girl who would be so into boys, even she could admit that. When students at her high school looked at her, they only saw a timid, anti-social plain Jane with her nose stuck right in the middle of an advanced science book. They’d study her unruly mousy hair, beady bifocal-covered eyes and bland clothing and only think of her as a nerd. A very, very smart nerd, but nothing else. She was smart, that was it.

And Isabella was perfectly fine with this, she liked being smart. It wasn’t as if she was trying to get a boyfriend or become popular; she was happy with just her, her best friend Lydia and her science, and she thought that was all she’d need to be content.

Until Josh Abehart.

On the first day of her Grade 11 year, Isabella found herself sitting behind Josh Abehart in her English class. She had heard of him before. Considering he was the school’s M.V.P. football player, pretty much everyone knew him. By the middle of Mr. Farrington’s long, droning speech about the course’s curriculum, Isabella had started to lose concentration and had drifted into her own world. English was never her favourite subject, she’d always prefer Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to “the profound theological and vividly-detailed struggle of the human’s instinct between good and evil in Lord of the Flies...”

During her lapse of attentiveness, she started to stare at the back of Josh’s head. It was a nice head - well at least the back of it. He had shiny, lustrous, dirty blond hair, which was long enough to stop traffic if he threaded his fingers through it, but not too long to rip away his masculinity. Isabella enjoyed staring at his head, and wished he could turn around so she could see the rest of it.

Fortunately, Josh turned his head slightly to her and whispered in a voice as soft and smooth as silk, “The old fart’s speech is a bore, eh?” Isabella let out a small giggle and whispered “yeah”.

His eyes were the most beautiful she’d ever seen: bright blue with a tint of green. She couldn’t help but wander into their depths and get lost. His lips were plump and rosy, the lines outlining them creating a perfect structure. His face was as smooth as a baby’s bottom, and his skin had the slightest tint of a tan. Most of all, he had the tiniest dimple in his chin which made it irresistible to want to pinch it. Isabella gazed at him until he turned away to her dismay.

The bell rang and everyone scurried out of boredom’s haven to their next class. As Isabella rushed out of the class, Lydia caught up to her and slowed her down.

“Wow, you were so checking that guy out,” said Lydia. “You were like awe-struck; I wanted to burst out laughing!”

“What?” shrieked Isabella defensively. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“In English, you were staring at Josh Abehart like he was hot enough to fry bacon on. You’re in looove...”

“Am not!”

“Are too, and you know it. Now while you remain in self-denial about how much you wanna get boun-chika-boun-boun with him, I have to go to Math class. ’Til we meet at lunch, love bird!”

Isabella didn’t appreciate Lydia making fun of her. Not only was she clueless about what in the world “boun-chika-boun-boun” meant, she also seemed oblivious to being infatuated with Josh. She liked his head, so what?

It wasn’t the last time she drifted from the lesson to stare at Josh. Every English class when Mr. Farrington went into his usual monotone blurb, she watched Josh: as he whispered to his friend beside him, as he leafed through his binder, as he threaded his fingers through his dirty blond locks, as he licked his juicy lips, as he didn’t move, as he did. Isabella especially liked that, she loved it when he moved.

She grew to liking to stare at him so much that she followed where he went, just to look at him. If she knew he went to the cafeteria, she went and watched him from afar. If he went to the library, she’d tell Lydia she wanted to take out a science book and she’d watch him through the shelves. Isabella developed a certain addiction to looking at him. Every single movement he made would make her numb and rigid.

A month went by, and slowly she started to fantasize while she stared at him. If he talked to his friend, she’d imagine him and her chatting together while he had his arm around her shoulders. She’d fantasize about kissing his supple lips when he licked them, and threading her fingers through his hair.

There were a lot of couples at her school. She always used to look at them in disgust, thinking how many germs they could transmit to each other with their saliva and how disrespectful it was to everyone else who had to look at them. Yet after becoming infatuated with Josh, her revulsion towards the couples making out in the hallway dropped, and she became monstrously jealous of them. Every time she looked at them she was filled with a sick, depressed, hollow feeling in the core of her soul, she felt so lonely. She wished she’d have someone to love her like that, someone to kiss and hug in the hallways, someone like Josh.

She tried to strike up conversations with him, but he never seemed to want to talk to her. It was then that she realized how ugly she was. Who would want to speak to a mess of human physique like her? She decided to let Lydia help her shop for new clothes. She started to not look like the drab, messy girl she once was, even some girls noticed, but Josh never did. Sometimes she would put on make-up and switch her bifocals for contact lenses for Josh to notice her, but he never noticed.

In the hopes that Josh could fall in love with her one day, she tried to strategize plans any way she could. To her advantage, Lydia sat beside Josh in both Math and World History. She pleaded for her best friend to help her in her schemes, to try and drop her in a conversation, to mention her once in a while to find out what Josh thought of her. After every class Lydia had with Josh she’d vigorously question her if she had mentioned her and what Josh had said, but Lydia always replied that there was never an opportunity to bring her up, it’d be too odd if she just started talking about her out of nowhere. Finally one day after Math class Isabella had a bit of luck.

“Lydia, Lydia!” she shouted as she ran to her friend and pulled her aside. “So, how was it? Did you talk to him? Did you mention me? Did he say anything? Did he say I was pretty? Did he - ”

“Calm down!” sighed Lydia with a roll of her eyes. “Okay we talked, and I mentioned you once.”

“Really? You did? What was it about?”

“He asked me if I’d be starting on my Math project tonight, and I told him that I’d be hanging at your house after school. So then he was like, ‘Isabella? Oh, that girl who sits behind me in English class! Yeah, she’s really smart.’ ”

“And what did you say after?”

“I said, ‘Yeah, she is’ and then he started talking about his football game after school.”

Isabella’s smile drooped. “So... that’s it?”

“Pretty much.”

“He... just said that I’m smart... nothing else?”

“Basically.”

“Oh, all right... I - I’ve got this book that’s on hold for me at the library, I’m going to go pick it up...”

“Did you want me to come with you?”

“No,” sighed Isabella as she walked down the hall. “I can just get it by myself.”

Isabella pulled her books closer to her chest and walked slowly down the hallway. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t happy to be called smart. She wanted to be considered more than just smart. If only he could have said that she was nice, that she was funny, that she had a great smile, or better yet, that she was beautiful, anything but just smart.

Her mission to obtain Josh persisted. She tried even harder to look her best, but he continued to be unaware of her changing appearance while everyone else noticed. At every single moment she got, she tried to strike up a conversation with him. Nonetheless, it always came out forced; Josh never seemed to be enthusiastic about whatever she tried to say, and he always seemed more open to talk to Lydia or his friend next to him. Why didn’t he want to at least speak to her?

Isabella went home and sulked in her room. It was pretty clean for a teenager’s room; she was a bit of a neat freak. Her entire bedroom was decorated with old projects, awards for academics and science fairs, a telescope and posters of the solar system and famous scientists. Other than absolutely adoring science, she was in love with the movie Grease. Above her bed, just in between her pictures of Galileo and Albert Einstein, she had a huge poster from the movie Grease with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John singing at the year-end fair.

Isabella swung her bag onto her the floor and fell onto her bed. She wiped a tear dropping from her cheek and squeezed the bridge of her nose to make herself stop crying. She couldn’t help but weep; she had never felt so disgusting and unwanted in her life. Josh Abehart’s rejection fuelled her depression by devaluing her entire existence. There was nothing she’d want more in the world than for a guy to hold her in his arms and tell her that she was so much more than smart, that she was beautiful. There was simply nothing she wanted more than Josh.

To cheer herself up, she turned on her stereo which already had the Grease soundtrack in it. The song “Grease Is The Word” blasted through the room and the grief that weighed her body down seemed to lighten. She sighed and walked around her room. What could she possibly do to try and get Josh? She’d tried everything, was there anything left to experiment with?

As she got to her bookshelf, the song “Hopelessly Devoted to You” started to flow from the speakers. Of all the songs from Grease, it was her favourite song.

“Guess mine is not the first heart broken, my eyes are not the first to cry... I'm not the first to know, there's just no gettin' over you... Hello, I'm just a fool who's willing to sit around and wait for you...”

Isabella glided her fingers against the books on her shelf, all of them science books or biographies of famous men and women of science. Would there be anything these books held that would help her in her struggle? Was there some kind of equation for love, some kind of medicine to cure her of this obsession, some method of scientific breakthrough that could help her at all get Josh in her arms in any way possible?

“...But now there's nowhere to hide, since you pushed my love aside... I'm not in my head, hopelessly devoted to you...”

Isabella’s fingers then stopped on a book. She looked at the large volume with the green leather jacket and the golden-embossed letters. It was a book she remembered reading only once; she had bought it almost two years ago. The title read Breakthroughs of the New Millennium: The Science of Cloning.

“..hopelessly devoted to you, hopelessly devoted to you...”

She picked up the book and studied its cover. A big smile spread across her face.

A/N: Chapter 2 is coming next. Please read and review!